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The Other Dead—the Image of the “Immortal” Communist Leaders in Media Propaganda
foundation, which was established back in 1941 as a propagandistic institution
directly related to the Directorate of National Propaganda. The activity of the film
department of the foundation is associated with the creation of all the newsreels
from 1941 onwards and the documenting of all important events in the country.
The propagandistic nature of its work continued after September 9, 1944, until
1948, when the Law on Cinematography was passed and the state-owned enter¬
prise “Bulgarian cinematography” was established (Piskova 2006: 101-103). The
same team of professionals who made the Dimitrov film captured the funeral of
King Boris HI in 1943.
There are two documentaries that reflect the funeral of the last Bulgarian king
Boris HI in 1943. The young Bulgarian director Zahari Zhandov filmed the semi¬
amateur documentary entitled Our Beloved King Passed Away, which is an invalu¬
able historic document about the era and this important event for the Bulgarians.
According to the memoirs of the daughter of the director Elena Zhandova, the
family hid the film strip in a secret compartment in their basement in order to
save it from communist censorship after September 9, 1944. The film was shown
only after the fall of the communist regime in Bulgaria on November 10, 1989,
and footage from this movie was used in the 2003 film for king Boris III One
Covenant. Another professional film about the king’s death in 1943 is captured
by director Boris Borozanov. The title of the second film is His Majesty King Boris
III—the Uniter. The reel preserves in close-up the faces mourning the death of the
king, many of which were those of prominent figures. The 35-mm film was never
shown to an audience and was kept secret by the family to save it from censorship
(Kovachev 2003).
Six years after the death of Tsar Boris HI, Georgi Dimitrov’ died in Moscow
and the film He Does Not Die was commissioned to a grand creative team. In film
circles, and even in the press after 1989, it was repeatedly shared by contemporaries
of the time that footage from the film for the funeral of King Boris III was secretly
mounted in the film about Georgi Dimitrov. The suspected images are exactly the
ones that capture the many grieving people and staff in close-up (Kovachev 2003).
A comparison of the frames in the two films would confirm or disprove this asser¬
tion, but the Dimitrov film is not available in the public domain (Fig. 2).
Documentary footage from the funeral of Georgi Dimitrov captured in 1949,
has been used in a variety of films—in the propaganda film from 1960 Georgi
Dimitrov—stranitsi ot edin velik zhivot (‘Georgi Dimitrov—Pages of a Great Life’)
and two more recent films dedicated to the mausoleum and its destruction—A Better
Tomorrow: The Georgi Dimitrov Mausoleum from 2000 and Pod ruinite na mavzoleya
(Under the Ruins of the Mausoleum’) from 2008, filmed by Russian filmmakers.
> Boris II was the Bulgarian tsar for the period 1918-1943. He was the eldest son of the former Bulgarian
ruler Tsar Ferdinand I. Georgi Dimitrov was a Bulgarian politician, leader of the Bulgarian Communist
Party and prime minister of Bulgaria for the period 1946-1949.
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